All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

It seems significant, and hardly coincidental, that the impasse that politics fell into after the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the eclipse of Marx and the research project of historical materialism. Social democracy, various left-wing melancholies and/ or the embrace of dead political forms has stood-in for these absent names. Returning to Marx, to Capital and to the various traditions tied-up with these names may present a way to cut across this three-fold deadlock.

The papers at Capital Against Capitalism will respond to contemporary politics from a range of historical materialist perspectives. We want to bring together the theoretical discussions and debates occurring in Capital reading groups, PhD study circles, and Marxist political organisations and networks. Our conjuncture – its manifold crisis – urges new analyses, new strategic orientations and the engagement of activists and academics alike on these questions.

Workshop 2B – TALKING REVOLUTION
Mark Steven: The Silliest Insurrection: On Marxism and the Marx Brothers
David Lockwood: Marxism and the Bourgeois Revolution

2.15 – 3.45
Workshop 3A – MARXISM AND LAW
Jess Whyte: Leaving the ‘Eden of the innate rights of man’: Marx’s Critique of Rights
Richard Bailey: Strategy, rupture, rights: law and resistance in Australian immigration detention
David McInerney: To read and speak the law: Althusser on Montesquieu

Workshop 3B – ACCUMULATION OF VALUE
Marcus Banks: How does workfare produce value?
Humphrey McQueen: Labour time
Ben Reid: Is there Australian Exceptionalism? Scenarios for capital accumulation and crises after the second great contraction